Grupenet » firefox

Disallow third-party cookies in Firefox 2.0

Jared Schwager — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:50:43 +0000

The upgrade to Firefox 2.0 from 1.5 added many great new features, but some features were also removed, one of these being the option to easily disallow any cookies that do not come from originating sites. Thankfully this option can still be altered in the Firefox config editor despite the option being removed from the main options dialog by the following procedure:

Open a new tab in Firefox, type about:config in the address bar and press enter. This should load the Firefox config editor.

Using the filter field at the top, search for network.cookie.cookieBehavior.

Right-click on this option and select Modify. Change the value to 1 to disallow all third-party cookies. Set the value to 2 to disable all cookies. To accept all cookies, change it to 0.

For more control over your cookies:
I highly suggest using the CookieSafe extension for Firefox if you’d like even more control over your browser cookies.

Use Google Talk in Firefox sidebar

Jared Schwager — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 02:06:26 +0000

I recently stumbled across a great little trick for using the new Google Talk Gadget in a sidebar in Firefox. There’s no need to install any extensions in Firefox as the functionality needed to do this trick is already built in to Firefox.

First things first, add a bookmark in Firefox for the link below. I’d recommend placing the bookmark in the Bookmarks Toolbar for easy access.

http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

Next, right-click that bookmark and choose “Properties”. Check the box labeled Load this bookmark in the sidebar and click OK. Now every time you click on the Google Talk bookmark it will open in the sidebar.

You can use this same method with any other bookmark as well, though it only works best for pages that can be viewed at very narrow widths.

Stop sites from resizing windows in Firefox

Jared Schwager — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:42:39 +0000

Ever visit a site which automatically resizes your browser window? This may be a big no-no in web design, but some people still do it regardless of what may be good and right in webdev rulebook. There’s an easy way to stop sites from doing this, assuming you’re using Firefox (which you should be).

In Firefox, go to “Options” under the “Tools” menu. Find your way to the “Content” section in the Options. Next to the “Enable Javascript” option you will see an Advanced button. Click on that and in the dialog that pops up uncheck the Move or resize existing windows option.

Once you save all your changes, Firefox will not be bothered by those nasty window resize scripts. There is also a more involved method of configuring the same option by using about:config, but I won’t get into that since the above method is much easier to do and follow.

How much time do you waste surfing the web?

Jared Schwager — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:50:44 +0000

In an effort to get my butt off the chair a bit more this summer, I’ve decided to limit my time surfing the web a bit more. There are a lot of great applications that can count how many minutes you are on your computer, but they do not count the time you’ve spent just surfing the web.

After doing a bit of searching around, I found an extension for Firefox called TimeTracker. It’s a simple addon which counts how long the Firefox window is in focus. So every time you go on to do something else in another application, it will stop counting. This really helps you get an idea of how much time you waste every day just surfing the web.

Give it a try and see how much time you’re consuming browsing the web. How much of your day is spent surfing?

Update (07/04/2007):
I just found out you can also add a filter list to TimeTracker in the options so it will pause the timer on certain sites, e.g., grupenet.com is on my filter list.

Fix web controls in Firefox on Ubuntu

Jared Schwager — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:42:49 +0000

If you’re a regular user of the Ubuntu operating system and Firefox web browser, you may have noticed that the buttons, text fields, radio buttons, and drop down menus in Firefox are quite reminiscent of those in Windows 98. Being a perfectionist, I always like all the buttons and fields (also known as widgets) to be uniform across the operating system and my applications.

Here’s a quick little hack to fix this, but you must be using Ubuntu version 7.04 and the Gnome desktop environment, otherwise you may run into some big problems. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you’re using Firefox to read this, you’ll first need to close it to begin this hack. Next, open up the terminal and run the following commands:

wget http://grupenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/firefox-widgets.tar.gz
tar -xvzf firefox-form-widgets.tar.gz
sudo cp /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css.bak
cat firefox-form-widgets/res/forms-extra.css | sudo tee –append /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css > /dev/null
sudo cp -r firefox-form-widgets/res/form-widgets /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res
rm -rf firefox-form-widgets

Now launch Firefox. The buttons and fields should look something like this: